Dr. Cynthia Gabbay earned her doctorate in Romance languages and literatures and Latin American studies in 2012 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She then worked at the Institute of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa, Israel (2013-2015), at the Elyachar Center and at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Religious Encounters (2015-2017), and at the Institute of History (2017-2018), the latter all at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. For the past three years she has worked as a researcher in the ERC project Apartheid – The Global Itinerary. Within this project she dealt with poetry by the Cuban writer Nancy Morejón and with discourses of transnational solidarity.

In 2015 Dr. Cynthia Gabbay published a book about the writer Julio Cortázar. She is currently working on a study on street art in Buenos Aires. At Freie Universität she will be working on her project on “Jewish Women Writing Utopia following the Spanish Civil War,” which will focus on the memoirs of Micaela Feldman de Etchebéhère, published in 1975 in Paris as Ma guerre d'Espagne à moi. Mika Feldman was born in 1902 in Argentina as the daughter of a Jewish family who had fled from Czarist Russia. While a student, she was active in anarchist and socialist political movements. In 1931 she traveled with her husband to Berlin, but left again in 1933. After a short time in Paris, she moved to Spain, where she fought on the side of the Republic during the Civil War, soon even becoming the leader of her own battalion.

The Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Scholars is a program of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation that annually awards up to 500 fellowships to postdoctoral and more experienced researchers from all over the world. The Humboldt Foundation maintains a worldwide network of more than 28,000 alumni across all disciplines.